tablet

35% of Americans aged 16 and older now own a tablet, says the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, citing results from a survey [pdf] conducted between July and September. While that figure represents a large increase from 25% in November of last year, it’s only a marginal increase from a May Pew study, in which it found 34% of adults aged 18 and over to own a tablet. As with the previous study, this latest research covers the demographics of tablet owners, but with a couple of extra pieces of data.

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Pew says that its latest survey contained enough English-speaking Asian-American respondents to allow them to be included as a separate, statistically-significant sample. And the results are certainly interesting: 50% of Asian-Americans aged 16 and over reported owning a tablet, far above the corresponding rates for Hispanics (37%), whites (35%), and blacks (29%).

Given that this latest survey looked at Americans aged 16 and up, rather than the prior survey’s 18+ range, it also contains some data concerning smartphone ownership among 16-17-year-olds. This group also claims high rates of tablet ownership: at 46% penetration, it’s above all other age groups in the study, with the 30-49 demo next (44%), followed by the 18-29 (37%), 50-64 (31%) and 65+ (18%) groups.

Unsurprisingly given the earlier research, there remains a large disparity in tablet ownership when sorting by education attainment and household income. Looking first at education, the survey reveals that 21% of respondents with no high school diploma own a tablet, with that figure rising all the way to 49% among those with a college degree. As for household income (HHI) level, adoption is at 22% for those with less than $30,000 per year, climbing to 65% among those with H! HI of at ! least $150k.

Search advertising spending on tablets increased by 113% year-over-year in Q1 2013, representing 64% of mobile search spend, per results from a new IgnitionOne study. Smartphones also saw strong spending growth (+112%), with both devices cannibalizing PC budgets, as overall paid search spending increased by only 2%. For the quarter, tablet users spent an average of 17% more time on site than PC users.

They also sported an Engagement Score that was 9% higher than for PC users. (Engagement Score is a proprietary IgnitionOne metric that measures behavior and propensity to convert on a relative scale.)

Smartphone users accounted for a larger audience than tablet users, but showed lower overall engagement than tablet users relative to PCs. Smartphon! e users s! pent 4% more time on site than PC users, but had an Engagement Score that was 14% lower.

The study notes that it is more difficult to track smartphone than PC or tablet users: 59% of smartphone users do not allow themselves to be tracked, compared to 9% of tablet user and 18% of PC users.

ComScore released its annual US Digital Future in Focus report this week, offering a year-end wrap of many of the trends its tracked throughout the past year and a look towards the next. One of the more telling stats concerns email use among those in their teens and twenties. According to the report, web-based email use among 12-17 year olds dropped 31 percent in the past year, while use among those 18 to 24 saw an even bigger drop of 34 percent. Some of that can no doubt be attributed to Facebook and other email alternatives, but a big factor is the growth of email use on mobile devices; both of those age groups saw double-digit growth in that respect, with mobile email use jumping 32 percent among 18 to 24 year olds.

In terms of sheer growth in the past couple of years, though, there’s not much that matches the trajectory of tablets (obviously aided by one in particular). ComScore notes that that US tablet sales over the past two years have topped 40 million, a figure that it took smartphones as a category a full seven years to reach. Another area that saw some considerable growth in 2011 is digital downloads and subscriptions (including e-books), which jumped 26 percent compared to the previous year, leading all other areas of e-commerce. The full report and some videos of the highlights can be found at the source link below.

Here’s an interesting look at how the platform wars are playing out across smartphones and tablets.

GeekWire landed an internal slide from USA Today that lists how many times its application has been downloaded. USA Today has a wider, more geographically diverse readership than most other newspapers, giving us insights into the ecosystem that we might not get from the typical measurement companies.

If USA Today’s internal statistics are any indication, the Kindle Fire is blowing other Android tablets out of the water. The slide shows 260,000 downloads of its app for Kindle Fire compared with only 130,000 for other Android tablets. That’s a two-to-one ratio.

The Kindle Fire still trails the iPad by some ~2.6 million downloads, but that’s unsurprising. What’s more impressive is how much headway the Kindle Fire has made in the short time since its release.

Further, you can see that the iPhone app is still beating the Android app in downloads. And Windows Phone has a lot of work to do.

Strategy Analytics has come out with another report on the state of today’s tablet market, which, not surprisingly, remains dominated by Apple. Cupertino’s iOS comprised about 58 percent of the global slate market during Q4 2011 — well ahead of Android’s record high 39 percent share, but down from the 68 percent it commanded during the final quarter of 2010. Android, in fact, has seen quite a jump over the past year, with total shipments reaching 105 million units during the last quarter, up from just 3.1 million last year (Apple, by comparison, shipped 15.4 million iPads during Q4, versus the 7.3 million it shipped last year). On a global level, the tablet market continues to blossom, with total shipments reaching an all-time high of 26.8 million units last quarter, representing a whopping 150 percent increase over last year. Read the full report at the source link below, or head past the break for a more succinct press release.

We didn’t have much to complain about when it came to Samsung’s flagship phone and tablet, so we’re glad to see that both the Galaxy S II and Tab 10.1 have managed to jump through the requisite hoops for FIPS certification. The business-centric feature means that both Samsung devices have been given the thumbs up for use in governmental agencies and other similarly stickler-for-the-rule industries. While the Tab 10.1 certainly isn’t the first tablet to receive the certification, it’s perhaps the most pervasive. Does this lay the ghost of underwhelming business phones to rest? We hope so.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.